Dreamwalker Read online

  Rayna plucked the shell from the sand. It didn’t have a single scratch or chip.

  “Estell…”

  Rayna’s proud announcement trailed off. A greater treasure caught her eye. A more amazing whelk lay just a bit farther out, in the sand between two large rocks. Twice the size of her recent find, it trumpeted stripes of blue and yellow across its ridges and bright white tips. Like a rainbow.

  Rayna dropped her previous prize and ran for the new shell. She scaled the shoreline’s first stone. Her feet sank into the rougher soil on the other side. A wave rolled in and swirled the shell back closer to the sea. Its bright colors shouted to her.

  A wave rose out on the ocean. It crested several feet above the others, a whitecap already perched on its tip. Its unimpeded journey across thousands of miles of the Pacific was about to end.

  Rayna ran to her escaping shell. The water shrank away. The shell rolled to a stop. It teetered toward the ocean and the spikes rolled back, like fingers beckoning Rayna forward. She reached down and touched it. It felt like polished glass.

  The rogue wave rose is it raced into shallow water. The sand around Rayna went into shadow as the monster consumed the sky.

  Rayna looked up. Blue water crested over her head. Her heart stopped.

  In the distance, from another planet, Estella screamed.

  “Rayna!”

  The ocean hit Rayna like a speeding truck. She went face-first into the sand. Gritty seawater filled her mouth. The prize shell tore from her grasp. She clawed in panic at the silt. The wave pulled her by the ankles out to sea. The ocean closed over her and the world went dark.

  Rayna awoke on the beach. She rolled on her side and threw up a stomach full of seawater. The acidic, salty taste made her queasy. Estella hovered over her, a damp, worried angel. Her sister’s anxious face relaxed into relief. Rayna retched up another round of the Pacific.

  “Oh, God, you’re all right,” Estella said.

  She grabbed Rayna and hugged her weak, wet body to hers. Estella felt warm, strong, safe.

  “You scared me, Little Sister.”

  “You saved me,” Rayna managed to say.

  So was born this sisters’ special secret, the debt that had, so far, been beyond repayment.

  Fifteen years later, Rayna answered her sister’s cry to keep her awake in that Philly apartment. When she failed, Rayna followed Estella into Twin Moon City without a second thought. Now, after what seemed a hopeless eternity, Pete arrived, opening windows of refuge into other worlds and a window of opportunity in this one.

  Pete could make a rescue possible. Maybe he could bring help from outside. Maybe he had the power to rally the people inside. Maybe he held some potent magic. One way or another, it would take a dreamwalker to save a dreamwalker.

  She shifted her weight on the fire escape mattress to avoid a broken spring. The ragged exhaust note of a gunner Jeep sounded two blocks away. Rayna tensed.

  Too much thinking, not enough time moving, she thought.

  The Jeep rounded the corner of the street below. A zombie hunter in the back swung wildly behind the spindle-mounted machine gun. It blazed away at random into ground floor windows.

  Sweeps switched to hunts when the zombies sensed quarry. No need to take a chance on that. She stood and looked across the skyline at the palace towers.

  “See you soon, Big Sister,” she said.

  She vanished through the empty window frame.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Daylight bathed Atlantic City when Cauquemere returned to the body of St. Croix. St. Croix awakened in his windowless office, feet still propped up from when he fell asleep. He pushed back his chair and stretched the muscles frozen in place overnight. It felt good to be corporeal.

  He checked the clock. Cabs should have already been rolling with morning deliveries. He left his office to stalk the shop floor.

  Two drivers talked and laughed across one cab’s hood. At the sound of the opening office door, their gaze flew in St. Croix’s direction. Their smiles went flat. Both skittered to separate cabs. Brake lights flashed and the two battered cars squealed out of the shop on their balding tires.

  St. Croix shook his head in disgust. Those two had a second career awaiting them in Twin Moon City. Rodney, the dispatcher, needed to double check their deliveries today. St. Croix could run Twin Moon City solo, but here in the tactile world he needed a right-hand man.

  The dispatcher’s office adjoined St. Croix’s windowless office. Scratches in the plastic window to the shop floor left the view almost frosted. Rodney wasn’t tall, but years of bullying and a daily gym regimen gave him a bulldog’s upper body. A black, button-down shirt stretched tight over his bulging biceps. His head was clean-shaven. A computer hummed on Rodney’s desk, but he was bent over the books, the paper books, the burnable books. The real business records.

  “Mr. St. Croix,” Rodney said as St. Croix walked in.

  He never spoke with fear, just respect. St. Croix liked that. In his dispatcher.

  “Are we on schedule?” St. Croix asked.

  Rodney looked out the window at the now empty shop, then back down at his papers.

  “We are now.”

  “Volume for the week?”

  Rodney handed him a paper from the corner of his desk.

  “Up 5% from last month, up 25% from last year. The drivers complain they’re scheduled too tight.”

  “The drivers need to stop cruising for freebies from whores,” St. Croix said.

  He handed the paper back to Rodney. Next month’s numbers would make these paltry.

  “What’s the word from Nieuport?” St. Croix asked.

  “He confirmed his deliver in three nights,” Rodney said. “As scheduled.”

  The scheduled time, St. Croix thought, but not the scheduled cargo.

  Nieuport brought in the heroin for St. Croix aboard an ocean-going motorboat on each month’s moonless night. Fast and low in the water, it could move undetected to a rendezvous over the horizon from the blazing excess of the city’s casinos. St. Croix met with him at sea, exchanged cash for the brown heroin bricks, and was back ashore before daybreak. St. Croix’s never-fail system avoided all the usual DEA interdiction points.

  But this next delivery was different, though neither Rodney nor anyone else in the organization knew it. The usual order of plastic-wrapped blocks was doubled and a special order item accompanying the narcotics, a little marketing tool for the sales force.

  Guns.

  And not any guns. St. Croix bought the finest high-power weaponry available. TEC 9 submachine guns, rocket propelled grenades, and a brace of launchers filled the boat’s hold. This hardware would be the ticket to consolidate distribution outside Atlantic City. Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore. The sky was the limit and he’d have the boosted supply to meet demand. He’d be one step closer to duplicating the netherworld of Twin Moon City in this tactile plane.

  There would be obstacles. Police and politicians would try to make names for themselves at his expense. But many could be bought. And the die-hard do-gooders? It was surprising what someone would do to get a good night’s sleep, free of horrifying visions. The less flexible would join Waikiki Simon in the end. But that made every outcome a winner.

  “Tiny and Stoner stay back on this one,” St. Croix said.

  The hired muscle usually joined St. Croix on the pickup nights. But this deal was too big, the temptation to double-cross too great.

  As if on cue, the two bodyguards entered the dispatcher’s office, all sharp creased suits and shined dark glasses, and stood just inside the doorway.

  “I need you two to put out the word,” St. Croix said to them. “There’s someone we need to find.”

  Both men nodded and took a step forward. St. Croix slid a blank piece of paper to the corner of Rodney’s desk and picked up a pen
cil.

  From deep within him, St. Croix summoned the vision of the dreamwalker, the image he pulled from Simon in the palace. His pen began to dance across the page. St. Croix started at the top and drew left to right, a quarter inch at a time, like a picture spun from a computer printer. In order, hair, eyes, nose and a mouth took shape on the page until it became an unmistakable finished picture of Pete Holm.

  “I want this boy,” St Croix said. “He’s new to the city, trying to lie low. Check mom and pop’s, convenience stores, small restaurants. Someone’s hired him. Put the word on the street that the reward is substantial.”

  The two men nodded. Stoner took the picture.

  “Tiny,” St. Croix said, “put a copy of this in every cab. He’ll probably be on foot when he moves.”

  Tiny, the bulkier of the two men, studied the drawing like an eye chart.

  “We’re on it, Boss,” he said.

  The two bodyguards turned and left the office.

  St. Croix had forgotten one important instruction. He threw the dispatcher’s door open.

  “I want him dead!” he yelled across the floor.

  Tiny and Stoner turned to face the boss.

  “Dead,” Tiny said. “Yes, sir.”

  “If he’s in the city,” Rodney said, “they’ll have his body in no time.”

  Unless I catch him on the other side first, St. Croix thought. I’d love to catch him on the other side.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dread had hollowed out a home within Prosperidad since her reading with St. Croix. Twin storms gathered strength in two worlds and only she could send out warnings. It was the curse that marred the blessings of her visions, the cloud that wrapped a silver lining.

  Prosperidad grew up in the Dominican Republic, which shared the island of Hispaniola with St. Croix’s Haiti. The border split the island into two distinct cultures, different as oil and water, the Spanish Dominican Republic and the French Haiti. Stability replaced chaos as lawless Haiti’s extreme poverty ended at the invisible line through the mountains.

  But the island’s mystical traditions crossed the border with ease. Voodoo and witchcraft were as much facts of life on the island’s east side as the west. The rhythms of the ancient ways were a more distant drumbeat in the Dominican Republic, a low thrum within the symphony, not the pounding lead solo that played in Haiti.

  Prosperidad’s first vision came just after her thirteenth birthday. She was visiting her grandmother’s mountain home, a simple ranch house perched on the hillside overlooking a lake, an escape from the coast’s oppressive summer humidity.

  One night, she sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, dressed for sleep in her T-shirt and shorts. She stared out the window and across the lake, consumed with the galloping anxieties puberty summons.

  The full moon’s reflection flickered in the lake’s small ripples. It danced back and forth, waxing and waning. The mesmerizing mirror image calmed and focused her. The more she watched the light shimmer on the water, the harder it was to pull away. Her consciousness drew further into the light, and further from the house, her bed, and her body. The edges of her perception grew hazy, until there was nothing but her and the moon’s wavering white dot. All her tangled thoughts, repelled by the light’s serenity, scattered for the darker edges. She and the light were all that existed.

  For a moment.

  Then Prosperidad arrived in the midst of chaos.

  She stood in a street in Santo Domingo. Flames leapt from the lower two levels of an apartment building. The bright yellow glow cast lengthy shadows across the street. Sirens wailed like panicked beasts, and the pungent scent of burning plastic enveloped her.

  Fire engines scattered the growing crowd of gawkers. Helmeted men in heavy yellow coats snaked hoses from the trucks, though the building appeared doomed. An inferno swept the bottom two floors. Billowing black smoke belched from every window above.

  One of the hoses scraped across the street and passed through Prosperidad’s feet. She reached out to touch a lamp post and her hand moved through it. She was here, but she wasn’t here. Real as all this felt, from the heat of the flames on her face to the sting of the smoke her throat, she was no more a part of these events than an audience member at a movie.

  Two pajama-clad boys appeared in a third floor window. The taller one forced his brother’s head closer to the opening and under the roiling smoke. Soot caked their faces but didn’t conceal their panic.

  Prosperidad caught her breath. The pumper trucks’ ladders weren’t long enough. Flames crept in behind the boys. The children were going to die.

  The boys looked back and forth between the street below and the building’s interior, weighing which was the lesser of two evils.

  The blaze backlit the two boys as it spread to the third floor. Sweat ran down their faces. Tongues of fire lashed from the building’s shattered lower windows and promised to sear the boys if they jumped.

  The older brother took his sibling’s hand and looked him in the eye. He said something that appeared reassuring. The two faced the street. Holding hands, they stepped off the edge.

  Prosperidad turned her head. She closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable screams as small bones hit the unyielding sidewalk.

  But no screams came.

  She opened her eyes and she still sat on her grandmother’s bed. Her heart pounded in her chest. She felt weak. Her cheeks were still warm from the heat of the flames. It took hours before she drifted off to a fitful sleep.

  The morning proved her experience more than just a nightmare. A headline in the paper stopped breakfast cold.

  BROTHERS DIE IN SUSPICIOUS HOUSE FIRE.

  Her spoon fell to the floor. A photograph accompanied the story. It was the building in her vision, a building she had never seen before last night. The two pumper trucks were parked outside and firemen sprayed wide fans of water on the flames. Prosperidad did not need to read the story. She already had more details than the reporter could have unearthed.

  “Lovely Child, what’s the matter?” her grandmother asked.

  Prosperidad doubted she could explain what happened without sounding crazy.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  Her grandmother looked down at the newspaper. A spot of mango juice blotched the house fire story.

  “It’s the fire, isn’t it?” she said.

  Prosperidad didn’t answer. Her grandmother gave her a penetrating gaze Prosperidad had never seen before, then nodded in recognition. She sat at the table beside Prosperidad, reached out and held her hand. She slid the newspaper closer to her granddaughter.

  “This is the second time you’ve seen the fire, isn’t it?”

  A confession tumbled out of her.

  “Last night,” she said. “I saw it in a dream, but I was still awake.”

  Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Her grandmother brushed them away.

  “Don’t cry, child,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Prosperidad said. “Am I some kind of freak?”

  Her grandmother leaned over and gave Prosperidad an intense hug.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Sweet Prosperidad,” she said, stroking the girl’s hair. “You have inherited my gift. I was afraid it died when it skipped your mother, but here it is, alive in you. I’m overjoyed.”

  “This happens to you?”

  “Ever since I was your age,” her grandmother said. “Today, the day I’ve longed for, I will teach you of your gift.”

  That week, her grandmother taught her how to call forth and control the hypnotic trance that foretold the future. She also taught her the two rules of the gift.

  “Rule one,” she said. “While others may pay for your vision, your own future must always be dark.”

  Ideas about winning the lotería had occurred to her. “But if I have
this gift…”

  “You were entrusted with this gift by the loa. They will not take kindly to greed.”

  Prosperidad frowned.

  “Rule two will make you even more unhappy,” her grandmother said. “What you see must come to pass. Try to re-channel the currents of destiny and they will only sweep you downstream.”

  “Even if it meant that small boys died in fires?”

  Her grandmother’s lined face grew sad. She cupped Prosperidad’s chin in her hand.

  “Yes, even if small boys die.”

  Her return home to the coast set her on her new life course. Puberty had released a torrent of hormones she had only begun to comprehend. Swelling breasts and widening hips made her feel awkward. The added advent of her gift of prophesy turned mild self-consciousness into self-imposed separation. After high school, she left the island for the United States to start over.

  But she couldn’t run from her gift. Word spread in the community that she had the gift of prophesy, and soon émigrés from the islands came from all over for her insight. She found she could tell them enough to allay their fears of the future. They offered the small fees they could afford. Their company assuaged her homesickness and she made enough to survive.

  But St. Croix’s readings were a different story. Darkness curdled within him, a hollow man slowly filling with a thick black bile, a bile that absorbed life rather than sustained it. She felt St. Croix’s monstrous malevolence before she knew he trafficked drugs. However, St. Croix paid her tenfold what the poor immigrants did. She rationalized that the information she provided was not inherently good or evil. The acts a person committed with the knowledge were what landed on one side or another of the moral divide. Back to Rule Two for her, no interference. Rule Two rinsed away all guilt. Until recently.

  The black spirit she felt within St. Croix, his dark alter-ego, grew stronger by the day. Somehow he drew power from the spirit world, probably in league with a petra loa. St. Croix had a wicked deed in the works, something that made his current operation pale in comparison. So she had called the Antelope Spirit for help. Not to intervene, as her grandmother warned against, but to deliver a dreamwalker who could. Perhaps that fine distinction could shield Prosperidad from her decision’s repercussions.